On Feb. 28, Taiwan will commemorate the 70th anniversary of what is known as the 2.28 Incident, when Taiwanese rioted against mainlanders from the Kuomintang (KMT) who had taken over control of the island when the Japanese departed in 1945 following their defeat in World War II.

Islanders were fed up with corruption and misrule by an unwelcome group of intruders that had usurped power and lorded it over them. Mainlanders were seen as backward and the KMT soldiers prone to violence. Police harassment of a street peddler and the killing of a bystander who came to her aid was the spark that lit the dry kindling of popular grievance.

Ian Rowen, a postdoctoral research fellow at Academia Sinica, argues in a forthcoming article in the International Journal of Transitional Justice that "KMT rule quickly alienated Taiwanese by centralizing power under a brutal and corrupt authority, dismissing Taiwanese as a colonized and 'enslaved' people, and pillaging resources to support its failing war effort in China."